skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>knowing these things is indicative of your general level of knowledge in certain areas.

Very possibly. But is knowing the same as remembering? Compare remembering the specific value of quicksort's worst case to knowing that some sort algorithms are better than others when, say, the input is likely to already be sorted, and that you should go crack open CLRS if you dont recall which.
A Single Page App with Knockout.js, ASP.NET Web API, and F#
In my case, the patent application is a gamble.

It's based on work I did for my Honours project. I wrote a bunch of prototype code and a pretty detailed description of its design and operation.

But in actual fact the invention is a miniscule part of the work that has to be done to bring it to market.

If spending a few thousand dollars now can help me raise hundreds of thousands of dollars later, I view that as a smart gamble to take.
Read Richard Hamming's "You and your research", quoted on full on PG's own site, and I've submitted it here for a separate and new discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349
The Saddest Movie in the World - Make someone cry for the sake of science?
Very interesting, and thank you for sharing!

I think one could make several distinctions about "being successful" though:

* You're good at it, and you're still employed at 50.

* You strike it rich, so you can do whatever you want at 50.

From what you write here, you're in the second category. Given the odds of striking it rich though, I hope people post about type #1 programmers too.
"Congress has no intention to destroy American jobs by outsourcing citizen monitoring to foreign countries. Eavesdroppers are the backbone of this country!"
If there's an obvious flaw in the existing study, you can make something out of a new study which doesn't contain that flaw. But it's very hard to convince yourself (and others) that replicating/failing to replicate someone's work is the same level of contribution as the original work.

What would be great: a centralised place for people to share their attempts to replicate a work. If several groups have failed, and nobody has succeeded, then there's certainly room for a rigorous, joint debunking of the experiment. If, as is often the case, there's some subtlety to get the experiment right, then the discussion around it between groups actually enhances the original work.
I think this comes down to personal preference. I am on a 24 inch screen with 1080 lines and I still prefer reading text in OS X to Windows on it. On my shabby laptop, not so much.
Submitted many times before, although getting very little discussion:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%28...

Referenced in many other discussions, and submitted here again because of this question:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626201
I also went to the Mountain View Space Camp in 1996 or 1997. It was the most amazing experience for a young space enthusiast. I was able to convince my dad to shell out the money for a flight suit, which I wore every single day while I was there. :)

The absolute highlight of the trip was being pilot on the simulated Space Shuttle mission. For anyone who hasn't seen it, their replica of the front end of the Space Shuttle was 1:1 or nearly 1:1. It felt like I imagined it would feel like being in the real thing. Being 12 never felt so good.

I still have my flight suit, patches, and the big book you got at the end.

Edit: Some other fun things I remember about Space Camp: "Buzz" Aldrin spoke at our graduation ceremony (though Wikipedia doesn't seem to know this). We got to try an MMU (manned maneuvering unit). We learned about hydroponics and growing plants out of soil. There were even rumors spreading around camp that some boys were sneaking into the girls' dorms at night. It was truly a nerdy 12-year-old boy's dream come true.
SpaceX CRS-1 Launch to International Space Station
Another question: How much luck was involved beyond making the necessary good choices? You can look at John Carmack or Peter Norvig and say that they made good choices X and Y and so on, but how much will this tell you about the prospects of a programmer who hasn't hit it big yet and who is doing all of X and Y? Worst case is, even though everyone who makes it to the top needs to have some qualities, successfully cultivating the qualities might still just get you from a 0 % chance to a 1 % chance at ending up successful.

I'm sure it's far from being that bad for programming, particularly if your main goal is to not end up miserable. Still, for every one John Carmack, I'm sure there are a 100 or a 1000 people as skilled and as hardworking, but who don't have the same amount of recognition.

They might have rather cushy jobs at some obscure R&D lab though. Which suggests a third question: What kind of people without widespread name recognition should we also be asking the "what did they do right" question about? It's easier to start thinking about John Carmack instead of Joe Q. Senior Systems Development Fellow, but that primes you for the somewhat wrong goal of trying to get massive name recognition in addition to the not ending up a miserable programmer one.
SEEKING WORK - Remote

I mostly do iPhone / iPad development
O2O Marketing - providing an infinite brand experience
I am fairly certain that we are moving toward a time where the way we interact with brands and their products and services will seem infinite
On windows it's located in:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets\Custom.css
ShortcutsMan: Find, Edit, Delete Broken Shortcuts In Windows.
I'm in the UK, I know people who are excellent developers who don't have degrees on any kind and who have no problems whatsoever getting employed.

Mind you they have 10+ years experience and can point to major succesful projects - so whether or not they have a degree or not is rather irrelevant.
New web security system tests computers' emotions
the following article could have been written for this thread: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
How to install silently malicious extensions for Firefox
Why does it take so long to learn mathematics?
Kumon is such a drag  - Move to a fresher way - PracTutor
The security of the infrastructure lies in the backbone, not the terminals.

If you "own" the backbone you can spy and/or paralize the whole country.
I think explicitly versioned file systems might be better. Cheaper to implement than transactions and useful in more cases.
Mixing video and audio - an HTML5 experiment
If you can't remember quicksort's average vs. worst cases, odds are that the behaviour of sorting algorithms isn't sufficiently top-of-mind that you'll say "wait, this data might already be sorted! I might need to use a different algorithm here".
I don't understand the fixation with the polygraph. Scientifically it's a discredited device, and in court it doesn't yield admissible evidence. I see that it intimidates people, but they should know better I think.
US congress rules Huawei a 'security threat'
I like to think that successful people of all professions owe it to their methods (and then there is pure "luck" too). E.g., Seinfeld has been known to improve his skills on a daily basis, and is still able to deliver highly successful products (e.g., he wrote "Bee Movie", a surprise hit movie). Might be that his daily improvement has nothing to do with it, but you can never make much of anecdotes anyway. There is an app for that which I like to use: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8

Einstein said something like "I owe many of my achievements to my persistence, not letting go of my goal until I achieve it" (Nash proved later that keeping to a strategy [= persistence] increases chances of winning a game), and Feynman has been known as a big advocate of the scientific method per se. Again, hard to say whether they owe their Nobel prizes to these methods, but I like to think that they helped.

Methods are actions gone habits. If you force yourself to think "Is this really right?" before coming to a conclusion, you will soon do it automatically. As a programmer, you could build up the habit of understanding the system you are currently operating in, before fixing or enhancing a part of it. Or you could write a pseudo-code script using your API (or testcases ;)) before implementing it, to get a grasp of what your users will actually use it for. You can make it a habit to blank out program areas in your mind which you don't currently need, to reduce cognitive load and turn a greater focus on the problem at hand (which will also enforce modularization automatically).

There are many such methods (also including getting more focus out of your worktime etc.), and they can become habits if you execute them for long enough. Habits are everywhere, and the (IMO) most crucial ones are hidden in how we think, and our thoughts eventually ensue our actions.
Much scarier data (to most laymen) can be found in a public records search, such as through Spokeo.
Intelligence Committee Concludes China Telecom Giants "Cannot Be Trusted"
Fair enough. I take a different approach in my interviews: try to gauge how useful the person will be to the team. We have internet access, and a library with CLRS if someone needs to implement a bipartite graph test. It matters more to me that they'd know why they'd need one.
No, gosh no. Google+ has shared an album of mine entitled 'My Love and I', with a few snapshots of my girlfriend and I going for a walk by the river, with the people I met at a Hacker News meetup. Embarrassing.

It also recently inappropriately shared another photo with somebody who should only have seen one photo.

Google+ brought really shitty privacy to the table!

tl;dr: google+'s privacy settings are outstandingly bad.
I don't know. I have trouble reading text on these white backgrounds. More now than ever before.

This might be the dumbest question but is there a system performance benefit in using grayscale?
Or more generally: it's much easier to excel in the intersection of two (or three) disciplines than to excel in a single discipline.

Programming + Biology. Programming + Economics. Business + Comic book writing. Programming + Business. Cooking + fluency in Japanese & English. You get the idea.
Coursera has several algorithm classes. I took Design and Analysis of Algorithms I (https://www.coursera.org/course/algo) from Stanford last spring. I thought it was really good, reviewed it here: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course.... There is also another algorithm course from Princeton on Coursera.

Class central (http://www.class-central.com/) is a good resource for seeing what is about to start.
I have no educational training in computer science, but I work as a software developer. I could not answer any of those questions, literally 0 out of 5.

1. Is O(2^n) equal to O(3^n)? Why?
I have absolutely no idea what that means.

But I did have to answer this question: why does the application crash? "Oh...that's because the developer that was pontificating yesterday about how heap operations behave asymptotically forgot to check if the database connection was open before he called the Save method. Apparently, such arcane trivia is beneath him. I can fix it."
> If there's an obvious flaw in the existing study, you can make something out of a new study which doesn't contain that flaw.

Not necessarily. How would you repair a study that requires strict controls but human subjects, without violating ethical constraints? You can't. Some studies are perpetually hobbled by the fact that you can't put human subjects in rat cages and force-feed them.

My point is that, beyond the replicability issues discussed on the linked article, there are serious and ongoing obstacles to rigorous experimental work in psychology.
Gangnam Style Hadoop learning
undirected bulk scans pose no security risk at all

A future bulk-scan may leverage a new SSH-exploit before you know it exists.

To put it explicitly: You should disable passwords and change the SSH-port. That's the two measures that make sense, to reduce surface and prevent password brute-force.

The rest of your recommendations is security theatre. An attacker dedicated enough to find your SSH-port and be set back by !AllowRoot will just brute-force an allowed username - if that's even a prerequisite for the given ssh-exploit.
There is now an effort to set up a new open-access journal of psychology that will encourage best research practices like sharing data with other researchers as a built-in part of submitting articles, and taking other steps to communicate (and thus allow checking of) the study method and hypothesis.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/building-the-perfect-j...

A local friend (a mathematician who works as a staff researcher on human behavioral genetics research) and I will be in the weekly journal club meeting later today at the University of Minnesota journal club. This week's topic in the journal club is discussion of Uri Simonsohn, the "data detective." Several of my recent submissions to Hacker News have been of readings related to our discussion today. My local friend sent out this background discussion by email yesterday:

"On Wednesday, September 26, Econ Nobelist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman sent an open email message to a group of social priming researchers and one of them forwarded the message to Ed Yong, the science journalist who interviewed Uri Simonsohn for one of this week's readings. This is that email message:

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.6716.1349271308!/suppinf...

"Ed Yong contacted Kahneman and interviewed him, then he wrote this short article for Nature News which appeared Wednesday, October 3

Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act: Social-priming research needs “daisy chain” of replication

http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-laureate-challenges-psychol...

"and this entry in his blog:

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls for ‘daisy chain’ of psychology replications

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/10/0...

"The story was also picked up by Chronicle of Higher Education on Thursday night, October 4:

Daniel Kahneman Sees ‘Train-Wreck Looming’ for Social Psychology

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/daniel-kahneman-sees-t...

"In related news, Uri Simonsohn posted his paper on statistical detection of data fabrication on the Social Science Research Network site on July 22, 2012 (draft dated 7/21). He has since posted a revised draft, dated July 29, which can be downloaded from this page:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2114571
There are no really successful programmers. In a general sense: There are no really successful wage-earners. The only really successful people are business-people. That applies to just about every industry. No one is going to give you a billion dollars (or even a million) to sit at home or in an office and write code. No matter how beautiful and optimised and whatever other qualities you think code should have.

Unless you want to define "really successful" as really good (which is subjective) or popular and then the answer is obviously to be really good and make something popular. Oh and try to make sure to get the timing right. ;)
You're making assumptions. About how things would work and about users and what they can and cannot do. Typical online discussion. Lots and lots of assumptions.

I do not understand your last sentence. Didn't he say his ISP is blocking outgoing mail? The recipients are powerless to unilaterally change that situation.

Think about this for a moment. Forget the corporate example. Imagine one user has a daemon listening for mail (no setup, it's all been set up for him:- it's "built-in" to his OS). Imagine there is an authentication method e.g. a shared secret and perhaps even some obfuscation like port knocking to hide the open port. Even assuming a determined spammer can get past this, is it worth his time? He will reach a grand total of one user.

We can even use a small overlay, where the IP addresses are private, not routable on the internet. The spammer needs to get into the overlay network first, again defeating things like shared secrets or perhaps private keys to identify machines before he can even get a shot a access to a listening mail daemon. That's not easy to do if the users stay logged in. And again, if the network is small, with a few hundred users or less, maybe only a handful, is it worth his time?
> When we are talking of successful guys out there. We are ideally talking of guys who are >40 now. I know a relative of mine highly successful 40+ guy.

I like your post and this isn't meant as criticism, but ... could we not say "guy" so much? Women are often terrific programmers, and there should be more of them. But that goal is thwarted by a certain common assumption about who programmers are.
Break down what "success" means for you, then figure out how to achieve the really important parts of that formula.

For example, my cursory read of your list of programming success stories plus "they've made a difference, they're well known and respected" suggests that you might care about your status among geeks in particular. There's nothing wrong with that, but it would counsel very different career moves than if you cared about your status among "the typical person who reads the New York Times." You might, for example, aim your moves towards a high-status industry that skews geeky (like, say, videogames, which is across almost any other axis a terrible place to work), startups, advertising firms which employ anomalously high number of PhDs and get disproportionate love from geeks, etc etc, and away from where many extraordinarily talented programmers are likely to work (in a dark hole writing important code that the world will never know or care about even though it keeps their planes in the sky, moves their food to their table, makes sure that when they call 911 a phone actually rings, etc).

In terms of being financially successful? There are many, many approaches to it. Most of them boil down to figuring out how programming solves a problem for a business, quantifying that value, and then shaking the money tree.

I think HNers sometimes have an unnecessarily narrow view of the solution set: for values of financially successful which include "I don't need to be a billionaire but I'd sort of like to earn, I dunno, doctor money rather than marketing manager money" it includes things like "Run a small boutique consulting firm", "Become an individual specialist in a few very valuable things and just charge market rates for them", "Use your programming expertise to found a non-tech business and ROFLstomp on one core area of operations due to your unfair advantage", etc etc etc.
It's because Javascript is allowed to override what's in the status bar.
I agree.

Pre-order vs pre-buy is a subtle difference that might make riskier projects workable. Projects get a lot of the benefits but the risk of customers & kickstarter getting burned is much smaller.

Some projects may not need the funding so there's no reason to introduce that risk. Others might be able to live without it. I imagine that having 500k of pre-orders could be leveraged for financing via another route (investment, loans, credit lines).

If Kickstarter is watching learning, maybe they can fix problematic categories by tweaking the model rather than banning them entirely.
Meanwhile, you discover a long time down the road that the algorithm you thought was fine is actually incredibly slow when scaled to large inputs because you didn't have a good understanding of runtime analysis.

Or maybe, as you say, understanding more things makes you worse at coding. Who knows.
The first two questions I knew the answer immediately because I've read about asymptotics and runtime analysis.

Questions 3 and 4 I simply don't have the background (I've never heard of a B-tree, and I've heard of heap sort but I don't know the algorithm).

Question 5 I'd not seen before, but an algorithm was quite obvious because I've taken a course on graph theory (of course, my answer could easily be wrong).

My tentative position is that these questions are easy if you've covered the relevant material before, and very hard to impossible if not.

Disclaimer 1: my degree was mathematics, not computer science, and I don't work as a software developer (though I do write code every day).

Disclaimer 2: one of the questions I "knew" the answer to, I got wrong!
Colin -- it will probably shock you to learn that I, ostensibly wielding an honours degree in computer science -- failed algorithms.

(Remember our talk about impostor syndrome? In my case it's actually true.)
It is not uncommon in Africa to have well developed 3G networks and poorly developed landline services. It would not be unreasonable for companies selling land line broadband gear to try and kick start demand in places where consumer interest in landline services is lacking. As an example Nigeria has extremely patchy broadband but is already rolling out LTE.
Yeah, patents protect small businesses and the innovators. Except they don't, and they're simply used by big companies to destroy the small ones. Too bad Obama won't change the direction for this all, since he already has his mind made up that what helps innovation is stronger IP enforcement, and more not less of this.
"Right click - copy link" is what's most annoying about this URL redirection. You don't want to send an URL of 4 lines in an email or IM, so then you have to go visit the link and get the real address from there.

Can't they do something where the HREF is left intact, but an additional onClick is added to track clicks?
I guess what lrem is implying is that this equipment is "payed for" by allowing the Chinese to spy on the citizens/government/corporations of the recipient country through backdoored Huawei equipment as hinted to by the article.
Concierge: A Node.js-based Universal Client for RESTful APIs
Not really since the 'sample' data is 'real' data which has been gathered during run-time.
IS XNA allowed by the WinRT? Can you publish XNA stuff via the Windows 8 store?
I love clever algorithms, and really enjoyed algorithm and data structure classes at university. However, despite having worked for over 20 years as a programmer in several software-intense companies (big and small) in the telecommunications and VoIP field, I have almost never had a need to know the answers to these questions.

In fact, it was the second biggest surprise for me when starting out as a programmer after university. I wrote this up in "Top 5 Surprises When Starting Out as a Software Developer" http://henrikwarne.com/2012/08/22/top-5-surprises-when-start...
Startups trying tp predict the future
Tutorial on scala and scalatra - DI with subcut, Akka, CORS and openshift
We use those kinds of approaches too. I never said the interview consists solely of closed book tests, they're just one thing I find useful to help gauge the suitability of an interviewee.

[EDIT] The thing I'm most looking out for is how a candidate answers when they don't know the right answer.
So, my tentative positions is that these questions are easy if you've covered the relevant material before, and very hard to impossible if not.

There's a lot of people who are very confidently giving wrong answers to questions, which weighs against that position.